Betrayal

Riya's POV

"Miss Lance, there is no gentle way to say this." The doctor folded his hands over my file as though he needed something to hold on to. "We found toxic substances in your blood. If you don't begin treatment immediately, you may not live out the week."

The words landed like a slap, and for a moment the whole office tilted.

"That's impossible." My voice came out thin and unsteady. "I had a brain tumor. I had surgery last year, and I've taken every pill I was prescribed, on time, every single morning."

"Miss Lance..."

"You've made a mistake."

"We ran the tests three times." He said it kindly, which only made it worse. "Our best team oversaw them personally. There is no mistake."

I had only walked into this hospital because my headaches flared up during a business trip. A routine check, I'd told myself while the nurse taped cotton to my arm. Now the room smelled of antiseptic, and the floor seemed to slide away beneath my heels.

Poison.

Someone had been feeding me poison, and I had swallowed it faithfully, morning after morning, believing it was medicine.

My thoughts scrambled back over the past year in broken pieces: the tidy rows of pills laid out beside my breakfast plate, the bitter herbal tea that was supposed to soothe my headaches, the endless advice to rest, stay calm, and leave everything to the people who loved me. Who could hate me this much? I was no saint, but I had never ruined anyone. I had no enemies that I knew of.

A small, ugly thought flickered at the back of my mind. I shoved it away before it could take shape.

The doctor hesitated, pressing his lips together like a man holding something heavy he didn't want to drop. "There's something else. Your scans show that you no longer have a womb."

The world went silent.

"Your operation last year was meant to treat your brain," he said quietly. "Yet someone cut into you in other ways. Whatever was done to you, Miss Lance, it was not medical care."

For years I had blamed myself for the empty nursery, the negative tests, and the tight little smile my husband wore every time I apologized. I had blamed my body, too, the full curves I had never learned to love and the weight he always said was to blame. I had believed I was the broken one, not once had I imagined that someone had broken me on purpose.

I stood so fast that my chair toppled over. The doctor called after me, but I didn't turn around. I booked the first flight home with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking. I needed to see Kelvin. I needed his arms around me and his steady voice telling me we would face this together. Then we would go to my own doctors, and I would find out who had done this to me.

It was almost funny. In the worst hour of my life, my very first instinct was to run to the man I trusted most.

The drive to the airport blurred behind a curtain of tears. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, then wiped them again, but they kept falling, and my heart pounded so hard I could hear it over the engine.

Without meaning to, I thought of the fire. I had been trapped in a burning building, choking on smoke, certain I would die there, when a stranger smashed through the door and carried me out into the night. Kelvin. I had loved him for it. I had chased him for years and poured my whole heart into him. I had even turned my back on my adoptive father when he warned me against him.

And I had driven away the one man who begged me not to go through with the wedding: Mateo Rutherfurd, with his cold brown eyes and his blunt, unwelcome honesty. "He isn't good enough for you," he had said. I had called him a snake and ordered my guards to keep him away from my life. Eventually he left the country, and I had been relieved.

Now, gripping the wheel with trembling hands, I wondered who I had really been protecting.

I never saw the truck, there was a blast of a horn, a flash of white light, and then the world flipped. My car rolled once, twice, three times, and slammed down with a sound like the end of everything. Something warm ran down my forehead. Glass glittered in my lap like cruel confetti, somewhere beyond the crushed window I heard running footsteps and shouting voices.

"Someone's alive in here!"

My fingers crawled toward my bag. It felt like it took a year to find my phone. I pressed his name and held the phone to my ear, listening to it ring.

And ring, and ring, until the call dropped without anyone answering.

"Kelvin," I whispered, "I'm sorry..."

Then the darkness took me.

When I opened my eyes, I was standing in front of my own mansion.

The gates, the garden, the pale stone steps I had climbed a thousand times: everything was exactly as I'd left it. Only the air felt wrong, thin and soundless, as if the whole world were holding its breath. I looked down. I was still wearing the clothes from the crash, stiff with dried blood. I lifted my hands, and I could see the pavement through my fingers.

Am I a ghost?

I climbed the steps and walked straight through the front door without touching it.

Inside, two pairs of red heels sat neatly by the entrance. I knew them at once. They were Hannah's. My best friend since childhood, the girl who had held my hand at my adoptive parents' funeral and stayed with me for three days afterward so I wouldn't be alone.

A warm relief swept through me. Hannah's here. She'll know what to do.

My feet carried me up the stairs toward our bedroom. The door stood ajar, and low voices drifted through the gap, growing clearer with every step.

"She should be dead by now, right?" Hannah's voice. I would have known it anywhere.

"Yes. There's no way she survived that." Kelvin paused as if checking over his shoulder. "The hospital will call me soon."

I stopped dead in my tracks. No. I'm hallucinating. I must be.

"It's exhausting, you know," Hannah sighed, and the sweetness in her tone turned my stomach. "Pretending, I mean. She's always around, always asking where you are, always clinging to us both. I can barely have you to myself."

"It's almost over." There was the soft sound of a kiss. "Once the paperwork clears, the company and the insurance money are ours. All that's left is waiting."

Hannah giggled. "I still can't believe you put up with her for so long. Did you see her at that last fitting? Not a waist in sight."

"Don't remind me." Kelvin's voice curdled with disgust. "Shapeless and soft, and she still wondered why she couldn't give me a child. I told her for years it was her weight. She believed every word."

"You poor thing. Why did you even stay?"

"Why do you think? Who else would ever want her, if it weren't for the money?"

Each word landed like a stone, for years I had cried in fitting rooms and hidden inside oversized sweaters because of this man, I had believed my own body was the thing that had failed us.

It hadn't. It had never been my body. It had been a surgeon's blade, and the husband who paid for it.

The floor dropped out of my chest, and suddenly everything made sense. The little silences whenever I walked into a room. Hannah's laugh, always lingering a second too long near my husband. 

The missed calls, the late nights, the excuses I had swallowed because I loved them both too much to doubt either. The tidy rows of pills, the bitter tea, the surgeon Kelvin had so thoughtfully found for me.

I had given up everything for him. I had turned my back on my own father for him. I had trusted Hannah with every secret I owned, and now I understood why Kelvin hadn't picked up while I bled in a crushed car. He hadn't been out of reach, he had simply been busy.

"But what if she somehow survives?" Hannah's voice dropped. "What if she finds out she's the real Davidson daughter? That would ruin everything."

I staggered backward until I hit the wall, though my body made no sound.

The real Davidson daughter?

"She won't," Kelvin said easily. "Nobody knows."

"I'm not worried about nobody. I'm worried about her," Hannah said. "But the pendant is gone. She lost that jade years ago and never looked for it again. She never even guessed I'd picked it up, and the Davidsons believe I'm their daughter now, so who would care about some lost trinket?"

My mind flew back to the jade pendant I had worn since childhood, the only thing I owned from before my adoption. I had lost it five years ago, just before my wedding. I had cried over it for days, and Hannah had comforted me through all of it, stroking my hair and murmuring that it was only a trinket, that we would find it together.

Her hands had been the ones that took it. Her hands had been so gentle.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear them apart, to rip Hannah's perfect hair from her head and force Kelvin to look me in the eye. I lunged at them, but my hands passed through like smoke, and neither of them so much as shivered.

I couldn't touch them. I couldn't even make them hear me.

Then I noticed my legs. They were fading from the ground up, as if someone had finally found my body and signed the paper that made me dead. My soul was coming apart.

"No!" I cried. "Not yet! Please, not yet!"

On the other side of the door, the two of them laughed softly.

"I don't deserve this." The tears ran down my transparent face and vanished before they could fall. "I loved them. I gave them everything. I can't accept this. Please, if anyone is listening, give me one more chance. Just one. I'll make them pay for every single thing they took from me."

The house blurred, the voices thinned into a hum. Of all the faces that flickered past in those last seconds, one came back clearer than the rest: a pair of cold brown eyes I had once refused to trust.

I had read about second chances in stories. I'd always thought they were fairy tales for people who couldn't face their endings.

Still, I prayed with everything I had left.

A wave of sound crashed over me, a string quartet, hundreds of voices murmuring at once. I gasped and opened my eyes.

My head was spinning and sweat prickled down my spine, something soft and heavy was in my hands: a bouquet of white roses. When I turned my head, a veil slid across my cheek.

I was standing at an altar.

Rows of guests stretched out before me, among drifts of lilies and ribbons of white silk. Beside me, the pastor checked his watch for the third time. On my other side, the place where my groom should have stood was empty. Whispers rippled across the hall like wind through dry leaves.

"Where's Kelvin?"

"Isn't he supposed to be here by now?"

A wedding program lay on the nearest chair. My name was printed on it in gold, and beside it his: Riya & Kelvin. Beneath them was a date I had last seen five years earlier. 

My throat closed. I flung the bouquet aside and tore the veil from my face, my pulse thundering in my ears.

I'm back. I had traveled five years into the past, to the morning I was supposed to marry the man who would kill me.

And this time, I remembered everything.